SOC*3720: Technology & Crime - Lectures 1 to 3

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering theoretical frameworks, digital affordances, typologies, official data sources, and research methodologies in cyber-criminology.

Affordances

The design properties or physical features of an object or digital technology that suggest how users may interact with it, shaping both behavioral possibilities and constraints.

Socio-Technical Perspective

A theoretical approach asserting that there is a mutual shaping between technology and society, meaning technologies and social structures reciprocally influence each other rather than technology being a passive, separate tool.

Cyber-Criminology

An interdisciplinary subfield combining computer science, sociology/criminology, and psychology to investigate how and why individuals commit cybercrimes, as well as how society and legal institutions respond.

Cyber-Enabled Crimes

Traditional crimes (such as theft, fraud, or harassment) whose execution is enhanced or amplified in scope, scale, or reach through the use of computers, networks, or other digital technology.

Cyber-Dependent Crimes

Novel offenses that strictly require the use of computers or digital devices to be committed, such as malware creation, hacking, web defacement, and bot warfare.

Wall's Cybercrime Typology

A classification framework proposed by David Wall ($2001$) that categorizes cyber offenses based on victims and targets into four distinct groups: cyber-violence, cyber-trespass, cyber-deceptions and thefts, and cyber-pornography.

Conceptual Dualism

The practice of artificially separating digital offenses from traditional offline offenses, which often leads to misapplying outdated legal frameworks and failing to allocate dedicated cyber-policing resources.

Digital Native Thesis

The proposition that individuals raised entirely during the digital age develop innate technical fluency that distinctly alters their behavioral habits and potential engagement in online crime.

Digital Literacy

The practical knowledge, skills, and perceived competence a user possesses in online environments, which can facilitate involvement in technically demanding cybercrimes such as hacking.

Digital Architectures

The structural, environmental, and contextual features of online platforms (external to the individual user) that provide and shape criminal opportunity structures.

Online Anonymity

A structural feature of cyberspace characterized by the perception of being unidentifiable, which lowers a user's sense of accountability and neutralizes the fear of legal or social consequences.

Asynchronicity

A temporal property of digital communication where exchanges do not happen in real time, eliminating immediate feedback and fostering desensitization toward the impact of one's actions.

Virtuality

The disembodied, decentralized, and anti-spatial characteristic of cyberspace that enables instantaneous global connectivity and eliminates geospatial and temporal boundaries for victimization.

Continuists

Criminological theorists who view cybercrime as 'old wine in new bottles' (Grabosky, $2001$), arguing that online deviance is merely an extension of offline behavior that can be explained using traditional criminological theories.

Transformationists

Criminological theorists who view cybercrime as 'new wine in new bottles' (Leukfeldt & Yar, $2016$), contending that cyberspace constitutes a genuinely novel environment requiring revised or entirely new theoretical frameworks.

Cyber-Integrated Theorizing

An approach proposed by Bossler ($2019$) that retains traditional criminological theories while incorporating digital architectural characteristics as moderating variables that strengthen or weaken established relationships.

Digital Drift

An adapted theoretical perspective (Goldsmith & Brewer, $2015$) arguing that the structural affordances of digital spaces facilitate individuals easily moving in and out of online delinquency.

Digital Seduction

An adapted theoretical framework (Goldsmith & Wall, $2019$) suggesting that digital characteristics, such as structural asymmetries, amplify the emotional rush of cyber-offending while diminishing self-regulation.

Cyborg Crime

A theoretical conceptualization developed by Van der Wagen ($2018$) using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which treats automated digital tools and software as agentic criminal actors alongside humans.

Space-Transition Theory

A context-congruent theory formulated by K. Jaishankar ($2008$) positing that individuals suppress criminal tendencies in physical space but express them in cyberspace due to distinct structural features and normative codes.

Cyber-Psychopathy Theory

A theory developed by Nevin ($2015$, $2021$) proposing that digital environments lacking human communication cues induce social dissociation, causing vulnerable users to display heightened psychopathic traits online.

Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR)

An official police data collection program established in the United States ($1929$) and Canada ($1962$) that compiles standardized counts and percentages of reported crimes across municipal, provincial/state, and national jurisdictions.

Canadian UCR 2.4

The updated $2021$ version of Canada's police-reported crime survey that streamlined reporting and established new violations defining cybercrime as any offense where a computer or the Internet was the target or instrument.

Crime Severity Index (CSI)

A Canadian measure of police-reported crime that weights offenses based on their relative community harm using actual court sentencing data, ensuring more serious offenses carry more influence on overall crime trends.

Dark Figure of Crime

The substantial volume of criminal offenses that go undetected, unrecorded, or unreported to law enforcement agencies, representing a major limitation in official police report statistics.

Definition-Sensitive Crimes

Offenses where fluctuations in official police crime rates reflect modifications in legislation or formal legal definitions (e.g., Canada's Bill C-13) rather than actual shifts in underlying criminal behavior.

Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)

An FBI division established in $2000$ that collects voluntary cybercrime reports and tracks monetary loss data from victims in the United States, estimated to capture only $10\text{–}12\%$ of total domestic cyber incidents.

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)

A large-scale, annual U.S. survey administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics since $1972$ ($N=150,000$ individuals aged $16+$) that captures unreported victimizations, including dedicated supplements for cyberstalking (NCVS-SVS) and identity theft (NCVS-ITS).

General Social Survey – Canadians’ Safety (GSS:CS)

A Canadian national victimization survey administered every $5$ years ($N=25,000$ individuals aged $15+$) that gathers self-reported data on victimization experiences, fear of crime, and perceptions of public safety.

Canadian Survey of Cyber Security and Cybercrime (CSCSC)

A biennial Statistics Canada business survey measuring the prevalence, financial costs, preventative strategies, and operational disruptions of cyber threats across Canadian commercial enterprises.

Trace Interviewing

A qualitative cybercrime research technique wherein investigators display a subject's recorded digital footprints or past online actions during an interview to prompt detailed contextual reflections on their motivations.

Digital Ethnography

A qualitative fieldwork methodology involving direct observation and interaction within virtual environments—such as public discussion boards or illicit dark web markets—to study cybercriminal subcultures.

Web Scraping

An automated computational technique involving computer code or APIs to systematically extract, parse, and archive digital trace data from websites, social media platforms, or online forums.

Honeypots

Controlled, decoy computer systems or networks designed by researchers and security experts to lure cyber offenders, enabling the safe logging and analysis of their attack techniques, tools, and keystrokes.

Capture-the-Flag Exercises

Controlled, lab-based technical competitions wherein cybersecurity researchers recruit skilled individuals to uncover, exploit, and remediate system vulnerabilities.

Nodal Governance Framework

A holistic cyber security governance model asserting that internet safety is distributed across and maintained by diverse nodes, including state police, private security, technology infrastructure hosts, regulatory bodies, and the public.